Stock and commodity exchanges provide real-time, delayed, and end-of-day price data in a standard format that is used by a variety of trading applications. This data is normally displayed on charts as vertical bars that each summarize activity over a period of time by recording the open price at the beginning, the highest and lowest price during the period, and the close price at the end. The bars are continuously recorded producing a stream of time-series data with a date and time associated with each.
Historically, the methods that have been used by traders to analyze the financial markets in an effort to identify and forecast the direction of price trends have been divided into two distinct approaches: fundamental analysis and technical analysis. Fundamental analysis focuses on underlying macro-economic and/or micro-economic factors such as Gross National Product, central bank policies, rates of inflation, unemployment rates, market share, earnings, profitability and supply/demand. The premise behind technical analysis is that all of the factors that affect a specific market at any given point in time are already built into that market's price, even if these factors are based on fundamentals or mass-psychology.